Well that’s the funny thing. What defines a child laborer? Most people know that there’s a difference between a 16 year old working the odd summer job and a Victorian 9 year old chimney sweep. But the historical memory of the chimney sweep is deservedly strong. It reminds us that for most of the history of capitalism, when guardrails don’t exist, children get exploited. Firms will act according to incentives and will push children, lacking experience and a voice, to do backbreaking and dangerous work. They’ll do it aided by rhetoric like yours, brushing aside the erasure of the robust edifice of labor laws that protected our young people in the name of “character building.”
I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them. Isn’t it interesting how little effort has been invested in mitigating the runaway cost of higher education? That we enabled college administrators to turn up the cost dial without speed bumps? No wonder why young people have become cynical: we exploit them at every turn.
I love John Denver's music and I am still haunted by his death, 24 years later. I had no idea his death was likely the result of poor user ergonomics. Engineering can kill.
Eliot is my favorite writer alongside Tolstoy. She was the first person to translate Spinoza to English and her intellectual prowess is so enormous and evident it bleeds out of every page of Middlemarch. She is the only author I’ve encountered who successfully blended philosophy and literature.
A slight aside, I must say I am exhausted by the focus on her appearance in biographies of Eliot. They simply care too much about it
I've recently challenged myself to read more papers related to the work I do as an engineer. It was a muscle I exercised as an undergrad but have since neglected in my working life. I had imagined these papers to be much, much harder to parse than they really were, the domain of proper computer scientists, but that's just silly. It's akin to how one should read a primary source over a summary -- the original text is not a mystical text beyond your comprehension; you too can engage with it and draw your own conclusions.
I love this biography because it shows how contact with the Islamic world was beneficial and generative to the West (and put the West back in contact with aspects of its intellectual inheritance that it had lost, like the thought of Aristotle).
Before I attended and graduated from an ivy, I attended a CUNY school for a year. I remember speaking to a classmate in my calc I class who explained to me that he was taking a full course load on top a 20 hour a week job at a local department store. All while commuting from the depths of Queens.
Life is just much harder for lower income students. They have less bandwidth, across every dimension, than many of the students I studied with Columbia, some of whom stayed in apartments purchased by their parents and enjoyed very comfortable allowances. (There are actually many lower income students at Columbia, just to clarify, and despite some assistance from the school I’ve heard more than a few tales of students being unable to feed themselves).
Epicurus is compelling, but I ultimately reject his philosophy in favor of Stoicism / Academic Skepticism for two reasons:
a) The Epicurean belief that emotional disturbance/perturbation is basically bad stymes emotional thriving. In a podcast with fellow Stoic Massimo Pigulicci, therapist and Stoic Scholar Donald Robertson points out that this idea is very close to the statement "anxiety is bad", a belief that correlates strongly with a host of pathological mental conditions/states.
b) The Epicurean aversion to anxiety pushes us away from political engagement and many other activities that root us in the murk of life.
That being said, there are still many profound insights to be gleaned from Epicurus' thought.
I come from an tight-knit immigrant family. One thing I've learned from my parents and grandparents is that you can be poor, you can even be oppressed, and yet endure if you have others.
I work at AT&T Labs and I always get a charge out of seeing that iconic logo. I'm a bit of geek about AT&T history and often annoy my friends by pointing out the Bell symbol on manhole covers, which can be found almost anywhere in the US (and also Canada through Bell Canada).
The difference between a medieval monk and a smartphone-wielding modern is that the former had fewer options for dopamine-generating distractions, while we have a limitless supply in our pocket. At a certain point the monk might be so bored that a treatise by Avicenna might actually be preferable to doing nothing at all, and that is no small inducement to deep progress, the processing of emotions, and contemplation more generally.
My favorite example of French dominance is the preponderance of French spoken in War and Peace:
“Heavens! what a virulent attack!” replied the prince, not in the least disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on his breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance who had grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pávlovna, kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head, and complacently seated himself on the sofa.
I've encountered people who gleefully celebrate this ("why would you study something so 'useless'?") -- but surely a genuinely affluent society should allow people to pursue their interests, instead of funneling them into the same roles? Isn't this a failure of political economics?
An alternative to (and descendant of) this school is Academic Skepticism, best exemplified by the thought of Cicero. It combines some of the best of Stoic ethics with a probabilistic epistemology that rejects certitudes but still allows us to act and move forward in the world.
>And I don’t mean that last statement facetiously; academic freedom and campus free speech are under attack. But what I want folks to understand is that academic freedom has always been under attack: it has always been so.
This article summarizes a view that can ascribed to Leo Strauss -- the idea that philosophy (which we can use here as a synonym for any rational endeavor) is often disjoint with political and cultural aims of a given moment. This poses a grave problem for philosophers, particularly if they enjoy, ehem, being alive.
Strauss argues that as such, philosophers must practice their craft carefully, and sometimes even surreptitiously. Hence overtly religious philosophers placing their actual, often impious ideas in the mouths of characters in their dialogues, characters that the philosopher appears to be critiquing.
I was (and still am) considering buying a Kia Forte, but only a 2023+ model with an immobilizer. There are rumors that Kia is planning to install immobilizers for free on impacted cars, but it's shocking that it's taken this long. I can't imagine how much reputational damage they'll sustain because of this.
This reminds me of how prestige dialects or formalizations of natural languages (e.g. Panini with Sanskrit) are perceived as the origin of a language, when in fact they are derivatives or refinements of vernacular.
I think Americans extol work for its own sake in a rather unhealthy way. I also think "hard work" is presented as a panacea for a host of problems, including poverty, despite the fact that many poor people break their backs toiling all their lives without meaningfully climbing the social ladder. "Just work hard" is actually profoundly unhelpful advice, without specific strategies and acknowledgements of all the systemic forces that give some people a leg up (and hold many others back).
Contrary to the rhetoric of the anti-work movement, I think work is bound up in self-expression, and to meaningfully contribute to the creation of something beneficial to others or to yourself is a deep human longing. I just think that we speak of work in a very crude and superficial way here in the US.
Anecdotally, I've always felt that what makes low-level seemingly hard is that documentation is either sparse, or written in an extremely dry way that is not engaging for a lot of people. Lower level stuff is prone to what I like to call "man-page syndrome"; i.e. when the resources for a software tool or conceit are presented in a kind of mathematical/formulaic format that average people can't be bothered to parse.
I will never stop marveling at the way Chekhov can turn an inner life inside out in one to three pages. One of the jewels of Russian literature.
One of the most surprising things about Chekhov is how his writing is some ways beyond ideology, politics or convictions —- he tries to present people as they are, and he implies that people behave according to incentives and drives instead of their purported beliefs.
Diogenes and the Cynics are worth studying for any person interested in Stoicism. Stoicism often feels like a moderated form of Cynicism, and Epictetus often invoked the Cynics in his teachings.
There was once a time when mathematics was considered central to humanistic and philosophical development. It is said that at the entrance of Plato's Academy, there was the following prohibition: "Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here."